Festus John Wade, III
95th Birthday Party for my dad, July 2023
In October this year, my father was diagnosed with MDS, aka Myelodysplastic syndrome. MDS is a fairly rare disorder in which the bone marrow can no longer create red blood cells. Given my dad’s age - 95 - he and his oncologist declined treatment, as it was not expected to prolong his life in any meaningful way, and would detract significantly from his quality of life.
It turns out that if you are 95, and have malfunctioning bone marrow, things start to decline fairly quickly. The good news is that his main issue was fatigue - which makes sense, given his body’s inability to produce red blood cells, he was getting less and less oxygen over time. But, if the way to keep an old horse going its to keep an old horse going - when that horse stops going, well, things stop. In this case, it seems like we went from “fine but tired” to “we’ll get him a wheel chair” to “he’s too weak to walk from bed to bathroom without help” within the space of about 10 days. And from there, he truly started to fade - but with that fading came a lot of talking about his life, his family. In one of our last conversations he spoke quite happily and lovingly of a recent visit from my two children - who had definitively not seen him in person since his birthday party back in August. But somehow, he had a vivid experience of talking with them, expressing his love for them and for us in more free terms than I have ever heard him use.
For a couple of weeks he talked - about his life, his parents, his grandparents. Which he never talked about in life. Other than some restlessness - trying to get out of bed because he thought he needed to go to work, for example - his true self emerged as a loving, kind, openhearted man. This was the man that we all knew was there underneath his severe emotional reticence. I rarely heard him talk about any of the major milestones or traumas in his life - his father’s suicide, his mother’s death, the death of his first wife and my mother, his time in the military, even his participation in the Olympics. He was truly a member of the Silent Generation, expressing his love for us with quiet pats on the back.
It’s easy to think of old people as being always old, but we forget that they’ve lived whole lives before we even meet them, and that mentally, they are still that young person inside, who “never got to visit the Grand Canyon, only got to fly through it as an Air Force pilot.’ As a younger man, he was big and strong, played football in high school, was an Olympic athlete (rowing, 2 man, 1948 Olympics, 4th place), and was a pilot in the Korean War.
At his core, he was extremely intelligent, which he always downplayed, in part because he knew enough to know what he didn’t know. Because had no ego about his brains, he listened and asked questions. And because he didn’t spend time pontificating and mansplaining, when he did talk, everyone paid attention. He had a gift for making complex concepts simple that I have always admired and tried to emulate. In fact, when my kids started interviews - for schools, for jobs - I counseled them to channel their grandfather. Listen to the question, take a breath and pause, and answer truthfully and without rushing.
I am grateful that we were able to host his 95th birthday party this past summer at our house in Ogden. He was still strong enough then, and mobile, able to climb the stairs in our house, and enjoy being with nearly the entire family.. It is hard to lose him, even at age 95. But his was a good life, and a good death. As his bone marrow failed and his blood cells diminished, he simply passed into sleep, and then into a quiet and calm death on December 13, 2023. The world is a bit smaller with his passing, and we miss him deeply.